Mod Lux Feeds

Scene In…

Now Playing

The Bay Bridge Demolition Sounds Terrifying

Scott Lucas | Photo: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons | November 12, 2013

It also sounds a lot like our grandmother. We'll explain.

An early Bay Bridge proposal.

Today, demolition began on a section of the Bay Bridge. Over the next six weeks, workers will be removing 1,400 feet of the upper deck near Yerba Buena Island. The entire project is expected to take three years, as workers have to carefully remove the superstructure, before moving on to the support and foundations.

And we couldn't be more terrified for them.

According to the Contra Costa Times, "The bridge's design is what engineers call "fracture critical." It's never good when the infrastructure is being described with words better suited to our arthritic grandmother. But it gets worse.

Just like her, the Bridge was born in the '30s. And just like her, it's having memory issues. The original designer died way back in 1951, and workers are having to rely on the original drawings and photos.

We could go on with the Bridge-to-grandma analogy, but we'll let the Times take over from here: "Every welded or riveted joint connecting the 10,000 steel frames, called trusses, is a key link in the carefully balanced structural forces that hold the cantilevered truss bridge together. Sever the wrong piece in the wrong order and the entire bridge or large segments of it could spring violently apart."

Spring violently apart. Yikes. It's times like these that we truly appreciate our cushy office jobs.